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Picture of a shanty town over "La Planicie" tunnel, created because of the rural flight to Caracas.. A shanty town, squatter area, squatter settlement, or squatter camp is a settlement of improvised buildings known as shanties or shacks, typically made of materials such as mud and wood, or from cheap building materials such as corrugated tin sheets.
The term is a noun phrase made up of the Spanish words villa (village, small town) and miseria (misery, destitution), and was adopted from Bernardo Verbitsky's 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América (“Villa Miseria is also [a part of] America”).
A slum as defined by the United Nations agency UN-Habitat, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing, squalor, and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47 percent to 37 percent in the developing world between 1990 and 2005. [ 1 ]
Shanty towns emerged on the periphery of Buenos Aires from the 1930s onwards and are known as villa miseria. After the 1998–2002 Argentine great depression , 311 worker cooperatives set up across the country as people squatted and re-opened businesses.
In Chile, the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970) began to permit shanty towns. [1] The need for housing had been shown when 10,000 people squatted a delayed construction project in the capital Santiago in 1961. [2] The massacre of Puerto Montt occurred in 1969, when an eviction of a land occupation resulted in ten deaths. [3]
Squatting occurs worldwide and tends to occur when people find empty buildings or land to occupy for housing. It has a long history, broken down by country below. In developing countries and least developed countries, shanty towns often begin as squatted settlements.
Misisi was established in the mid 1960s as a shanty town or komboni located beside the Kafue Road, three kilometres south of the central business district of Lusaka, Zambia. The name Misisi came from the Nyanja word for "Mrs" which referred to Mrs Edwards, the owner of the farmland which was originally squatted. The first inhabitants lived in ...
In areas of high population density and high poverty, shacks are often the most prevalent form of housing; it is possible that up to a billion people worldwide live in shacks. [1] Fire is a significant hazard in tight-knit shack settlements. [2] Settlements composed mostly or entirely of shacks are known as slums or shanty towns.